Hyde Bay gave me the best two months of every year for (I think) eight years. The first community I had ever had. Mostly I remember sailing Comets in Lake Otsego that were unstable but exciting, and then teaching others to sail them while I repaired them. And Treasure Hunts -- amazing advengtures in places I had never known existed near and not so near the camp. Great campers in my tent when I was a counsellor. Misadventures in Cooperstown bars. Chasing a canoe load of teenage girls up Shadow Brook.

I attended Harvard College 1954-58, a brief stint at the London School of Economics, a job as a journalist at the New Republic (1961-64), a job in the leftish DC think tank (1964-67), back at Harvard in 1967 as a soft-money researcher. Have worked at universities ever since. Harvard 1967-79, Northwestern (1980-96), Harvard again since 1996, with visits to the University of Chicago and the University of California. Wrote a bunch of books: one with David Rieman about American colleges, several with teams of researchers about the causes of economic inequality and the determinants of economic success, one about the successes and failures of the American welfare state. Now I am working on the effects of recent school reforms and of rising economic inequality. Two brief marriages in the 1960s that ended amicably, then one that has lasted more than 40 years, and even produced a much loved son who now works in the film business in NYC. It has been a good run, although these days, to quote
Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."